Serpentine Estate

Serpentine Estate is a Resident Evil 2 inspired thriller shooter with a focus on exploration. It was developed half time over 15 weeks, along with the engine that runs it.

An investigating journalist seeks to unveil the strange incidents of the Serpentine Estate, but finds himself fighting his way out of an otherworldly mystery.

My Contributions

During this project I created a bone socketing tool, an animation event tool and the majority of the HUD elements. I also put together the menues.

Not displayed in the mockup on the left is the Location Indicator, which tells you what part of the Estate you just entered, to help you become familiarized and not get lost as easily.

I joined Hade Haj Studio for this project as they were missing a programmer. It was difficult to immerse myself in a completely new code base, but a challenge I was ready for.

Bone Sockets and Animation Events

Initally I dove into the extensive editor and made a few additions I knew were going to be crucial in a Resident Evil 2 type of game.

The first challenge of any tools project involved making an easy to use UI. I focused on clarity and quickness, wanting my artists to be able to quickly understand how the tool works and quickly be able to produce something testable.

The Sockets are just predetermined offsets from a bone, allowing you to create "slots" to later use to either attach game objects to using the "attach to socket component" or simply use as the position for something.

Animations Events work very much like Animation Notifications in Unreal Engine. Essentially, events called at a specific frame of an animation.

Bonesockets were used for the composite hitboxes for the enemies, as well as for the cutscene cameras. Animation Events were used a lot during the cutscenes to trigger specific things, and for things like footsteps!

Menu Scenes

I was informed partway into this project that previously there had not been any system for menues or states in their games. Looking at the code it was apparent that menues were an afterthought in the previous project. That which could be salvaged was salvaged. Then I set out to codemine a system I used in a previous project, which presented me with an opportunity. With that old system I could add the option of having an in engine rendered scene as the backdrop for the menues.

It required me to rewrite large portions of the Scene Manager, which took me a couple of days to complete. An added bonus to this is that the engine was now capable of handling multiple levels, instead of just the one at a time.

Hade Haj Studio members: